AMIDST THE AZALEAS

It was very late at night; clouds from the Pacific were rolling over Nagasaki, and it was evident that the hot weather of the last two days had been the prelude of a storm.

The House of the Clouds, lamp-lit and deserted, cast from the opening in the shoji a long parallelogram of light that cut the darkness like a sword; a sword of light lying upon the veranda, the graveled walk, and the landscape garden.

With the darkness outside had come a great silence broken only by the wind.

Had you been standing on the veranda you would have sworn that some blind person was prowling before the house, soundless of foot and cautiously feeling his way by tapping on the ground with a stick.

It was only the lath shaken by the wind, the tireless lath that all day and all the night before had kept the echoes of the garden answering its summons, and still kept up the unwearied sound-semblance of a blind man who walked without footstep, a patient sentinel, now advancing, now retreating, now at the garden gate, now near the azaleas, and ever waiting.

The garden gate clicked, and hurried footsteps came up the path.

It was Leslie, hatless, bright and wild of eye, walking rapidly, but in a tottering manner. His lips were of a dull purple color, and he had the aspect of a man heavily drugged with opium.

He crossed the veranda and entered the deserted hall. He looked into the rooms on either side—they were both empty. Then he came back to the hall, and cried out, "Campanula!" The rafters returned the sound of his voice, but she did not answer.

He was perfectly clear of mind, but his breathing was affected, and a deadly torpor hung over him which his will alone prevented falling.

He took in all the details around him with extraordinary clearness, amongst others the fact that the mushi's cage had been removed.

Having waited for a moment, straining his ears to catch the faintest sound, he seized the swinging paper lantern that lit the hall, and with it in his hand went into the kitchen. It was deserted. Then he went upstairs—every room was empty. It was like a house from which the people had fled in terror, and he came down again, wild with the apprehension of some unknown tragedy.

He brought the lamp into the room on the right of the passage, and placed it on the floor. Something crimson lay on the primrose-colored matting. He picked it up; it was Campanula's obi. Why had she cast it there?

He was looking round him as if for a person to explain all these things, when his eye caught an open drawer of the great lacquer cabinet that contained his papers. He looked into the drawer, and it was empty. It was the drawer in which he had placed the waki-zashi—the suicide sword, given to him by Jane.

From the open drawer his eyes turned to the obi, which he had dropped, and then he looked round him, as Dives looks round him in that picture of Teniers, where Dives wakes in Hell.

As he stood, the wind shook the broken lath outside, and played with it. "Tap! tap! tap!"

He saw the sunlit Nikko road, the valley of the crimson azaleas, the Lost One who had loved him as no other being had loved him—the one he had lost for ever.

She was dead, yet it was denied to him to find her, and clasp her in his arms, and die with her.

Death was nothing, but never to find her again, never to see her again, or touch her small body, that was an agony far beyond death.

He left the room, feeling by the walls like a man without sight.

Outside, the world was in utter darkness. More clouds had rolled up over the sky, as if called by the Blind One, the tapping of whose stick betrayed him, as he walked, waiting for his prey.

If he could find her, what cared he for the Blind One! If he could not find her he felt that he would be for ever lost. But he could never find her more, for the opium sleep was falling upon him now. He had no more strength to fight it, and the darkness of the pit lay around him.

Suddenly, the night wind changed, and brought him the perfume of the unseen azaleas, and with the perfume a thin thread of song.

It was the song of the mushi—the atom of life he had spared that day in his fury, even as God might now be sparing him—the mushi she had loved so well. Feeling by the veranda wall, he followed the song like a man led by a thread, and as he came he crushed something beneath his foot: it was the lath, whose sound would never trouble him again.

He felt the azalea bushes around his knees, and advanced amongst them, still led by the tremulous song, till his foot touched something soft, and his hand a tiny cage, hanging to one of the crimson-flowering boughs.